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Topic: This forum is stagnate, and here is what I will do about it. (Read 1847 times)

I was just in the Aneristic Illusions, rereading Cain's post about the direction of that subform. I am not much for geopolitics in general, so I have little to contribute to that discussion. However, I agree with the general sentiment: small, local notions about how much American conservatism sucks, for example, are not really useful in discovering and illustrating worldwide geopolitical patterns which matter to the Discordian mindset. We already know that large factions of rural and southern USAdia are racist, bigoted, and religiously fundamentalist, and yet one more story about this is not going to alter our perceptions of the more worldwide problems of neo-conservative authoritarianism backed by economic players such as industry and banking. In fact, I don't even really understand if the that last statement is true, because I'm ill informed about the issues particularly because all I see is local politics.

You may notice that, while I started a "weekly science news" thread in this subforum sometime ago, I have not updated it in almost as long. The same things that hold for geopolitics is true for science. There are a large number of daily "oos and ahhs" which I love to hear about. I in fact have been providing a "Kai's SCIENCE! Facebook edition" for several weeks now. This is not only a free service for my friends, but also a way for me to keep up to date on scientific discovery. Feel free to add me; you'll have science news coming at you daily, Monday through Friday.

But, these stories are largely minor. In isolation, they don't illustrate larger scale trends, not only in scientific discovery and technological progress, but also in the way science is conducted and published. A story about the pendulum motions of cockroaches and geckos allow them to flip under ledges is cool, but it doesn't go into the larger trends of biomimetic robotics. As much as I love waxing on about new species and my own science of taxonomy, this seldom addresses the changing scope of the biodiversity crisis, not to mention the vague idea people have about climate change and what that actually means when you get down to error bars in estimations. The same goes true for individual discoveries in medicine, planetary science, and personal technology. I look at the top stories in Science and Technology on the Newsmap applet every morning, and inevitably they are inconsequential corporate tech news. This is as useless as talking about the latest stateside racist episode.

I don't claim to be an expert on every scientific field, but I do feel like I have a pulse on whats going on day to day, as little or as much as I understand it. What I want to do /here/, is provide you all with, not individual stories, but broader discussions, again, similar to those Cain spoke of. And I would love if you would provide me with those as well.

I unfortunately don't have a bulleted list at the moment. Maybe you could help me with that: What science do you all find to be the most important? What trends do you want to track?

Logged

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia DissectionGrand Visser of the Six Legged ClassChanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

I also really enjoy the Python thread and would generally like to encourage more computer programming-related discussion here. Except that's of course limited by the amount of members able to understand and discuss such topics. Still, there are a great many ways in which all sorts of code can be used for Discordian-related purposes (I should probably write a post about what I mean, some time, it's off-topic ITT, however).

As you may notice, the above posts are mainly about technology, not so much science. That's because most advances in science that I read about are Computer Science and Computational Science. And as long as there aren't any more advanced programming discussions and I'm the only one who occasionally posts a LaTeX formula (usually in a bad attempt at humour), I don't really see news about those fields eliciting much more than a "huh, cool". Machine Learning algorithms, faster Fourier transforms, novel hash functions, some obscure crypto function got a few bits less secure ...

For instance, I got a PDF open right now called Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World which describes a Computer Vision algorithm that amplifies subtle changes in a video feed. Apparently it works so well that you can record your face with a cheap webcam and it'll change your skin colour between yellowish and red with the frequency of your heartbeat because it can amplify the subtle changes in colour due to blood flow in your face. Pretty cool huh? I thought so too, but also for me it's just "huh, cool" until I've studied the PDF and figure out HOW they do this (broadly they build a spatial decomposition pyramid for the image, then apply a temporal filter to those elements--in this case a bandpass centred on plausible heartbeat frequencies--and then recompose the image using for each element of the pyramid a weighted sum of the original and filtered element. seems pretty simple actually, but there are some subtleties and formulas to chew on) and hopefully manage to code something to get my webcam to do something similar

Also, I'd like to propose to unsticky the "Hacks & Kludges" thread since nobody ever posts in it and it never really took off and seems mostly to be a collection of links to thereifixedit.com.

On the same note, but mostly to make space for other better stickies, I don't really see the use for the "The Tech Forum" thread to be stickied on top, either. It's supposed to be a description of this subforum, but it's not really, also I think this forum is pretty self-explanatory.

For new stickies, I'd like to nominate the Privacy and Security Threads Also it would be really cool if we could put a general computer programming related thread on top there maybe. Uhm, AND of course some other things on non-computer related topics, but I'm not the best person to suggest those.

I get abstracts in my work email. Once the article goes public, I can post a link (the emails come with the warning "do not cite or quote" since at that point they haven't been submitted to a journal), if you give me an area of interest. We don't limit ourselves to cancer, and actually have some pretty interesting studies involving other things, like, suicidality, LGBT/youth/LGBT-youth issues, and genetic risk factors.

If I recall, it might be a 6 month lag, but I don't really delete email, so I can look back as far as 2008-2009ish for articles that are currently in publication.